News

December

2019

The Passengers

Peter Atkins’ new project is a series of small-scale paintings that relate to his Metro Tunnel public commission entitled RAILway for Melbourne’s City Square, installed along Swanston Street un til October 2019.

The Passengers explores our collective social, cultural and personal narratives through the abstracted, obsolete designs of suburban train tickets issued between 1920 and the late 1980s by distilling and stripping away unnecessary details, focusing instead on the beautiful abstraction underneath. What is revealed is an extremely evocative collection of abstracted forms and colours that represent a complicated and fascinating visual coded language that is particular to Melbourne.

The Passengers continue Peter’s interest in appropriating and deconstructing what he terms readymade abstraction from the real world and amplifying those almost nothing moments…

La Razza: Quiet Noise

Sky Light Mind

Brendan Huntley’s new body of work, Sky Light Mind, is strongly influenced by, as Huntley puts it “the natural light and crazy vibrant colours of the West Coast” he experienced while based in San Francisco on a residency in 2017.

“I see these works as a meditational expedition,” he says. “A journey, a trek… with paint, clay, glaze, glass, collage, and whatever other materials get sucked into the creative vortex.”

The Landspace: [all the debils are here]

In this new sequence of works, Mellor reimagines the landscape as the landspace, and in doing so opens up a new way of seeing history, ownership and possession of country.

“Reimagining the world as a landspace suggests we are in an enveloping environment, a world that has its past, present and future – its dreaming and landstory – unfolding as prescient and concurrent phenomena,” Mellor says.

Strawberry Thief

Tolarno Galleries presents Elizabeth Willing’s solo exhibition, Strawberry Thief, at this year’s Melbourne Art Fair. The exhibition will include a wallpaper print, a series of collage prints, hand-carved wooden sculptures and Anxiolytic. This is a bottled and branded spirit and glasses that will form part of a cocktail performance in collaboration with Melbourne mixologist, Cennon Hanson.

Elizabeth Willing’s Strawberry Thief project, presented at Melbourne Art Fair 2–5 August 2018, has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

May

Invisible Stories: Meditations on Port Essington

In his first solo exhibition since 2012, Benjamin Armstrong will present a series of linocut prints relating to Mark McKenna’s 2016 book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories.

Spill

For his sixth exhibition at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne-based Andrew Browne presents new paintings and related charcoal drawings that extend his decades long interest in a landscape of phenomena – yet one alienated from the picturesque.

Bill Henson

“Plenty of artists conjure with images from the history of art, but none has been so ambitious in their attempt to marry the immediate, over-brimming present with the haunted past. And the fact remains that no other living Australian artist has produced as many images so full of tenderness, silence and longing” – Sebastian Smee, The Monthly April 2017

Buddens

Buddens finds Rosemary Laing returning to Shoalhaven, New South Wales, the landscape of the iconic series groundspeed (2001).

As Laing notes: “The arrival­ of people, throughout history, shifts what happens in land, challenging those who have left their elsewhere, and disrupting the continuum of their destination place. A disruption causes a reconfiguration. It elaborates both the beforehand and the afterward.”

Notes on Chaos

Trump tweets, North Korean missile launches, global terrorism, vengeful weather, disruptive economies and Middle East instability: it feels like the rug has been pulled from under us. How do we respond to a world upside down, a place of crumbling sureties? Ben Quilty’s new work expresses the uneasiness of a society anxious about the future through the lens of personal experience – Michael Desmond, 2018